Five Reasons You Can’t Stay Motivated When You Diet

Are you able to stay motivated during weight loss? Sometimes we start losing weight with a diet and exercise plan, but we don’t finish. Maybe outside pressure becomes overwhelming or perhaps we aren’t ready to lose weight. Whatever the cause, both men and women find this aspect of dieting especially hard.

But you’re not destined for failure. Even if you’ve started and stopped countless times before, you can still make weight loss happen. By putting some important skills to use, you will find it a little easier to stay motivated, stick to your weight loss efforts and reach your goal weight.

1. If you are exercising to burn fat stop doing that.

The goal of exercising is to get better at exercise so if you are doing a bootcamp ask yourself “do I want to get better at Bootcamp”. That answer might be yes and here would be a good reason to do so. There is a strong correlation between your Vo2max and your resting heart rate and the amount you can eat or the deficit you can create when dieting. Additionally, an exercise like Bootcamp CAN help you hold onto muscle, which is not fat. I emphasize CAN because if you have been doing boot camps on and off for the last 5 years your body has probably adjusted.

So stop exercising to lose fat and start exercising to get better at what you are doing.

2. If you are DOING something you don’t like, to see a result that’s not smart.

Jenny:

When I started HDT I will admit, it just looked harder than what I was doing at that time. It isn’t the exercises or how they are programmed, it’s the community you exercise with. Where you see people thriving with a great community. The people I worked out with pushed me beyond what I thought was capable of at that time and while I didn’t love it at the moment. I loved the accomplishment each time.

3. Quit trying to PERFORM well in a dieting cycle

The whole point of a dieting cycle is to lose weight. I KNOW I KNOW, you didn’t lose weight in your last dieting cycle but you FEEL BETTER. Was that your goal when you started, to feel better?

Fat Loss is simple and for almost everyone, if you want to lose fat you have to lose weight. It’s simple really, unless you make it really hard, which is my next point.

4. If you have tried every diet on the internet that doesn’t mean that you have tried everything.

Just because you have no impulse control and click on every internet group, thread or whatever extreme option you KEEP choosing doesn’t mean you have tried everything. Also, there is no difference between FREE and WORTHLESS, you might be able to comb through the nonsense of some groups but if everyone in the group is on EVERY supplement there is to support their adrenals and every third thread is someone that doesn’t sleep and can’t figure out why here is why. They are wired out of their mind from not eating.

For every person that says to me that they won’t pay for dieting advice here is what I will say to you. There is often a strong correlation between fit people paying for advice and unfit people wanting it for free.

5. I left the best one for last because it’s the biggest reason most people fail diets. They pick something where food is the enemy (or someone convinces them they are broken).

You literally need to eat for the rest of your life, think of it like a marriage, do you want to be married to the way you eat now?

It’s very similar to exercise if you don’t love it you will quit, you will quit because you are sane. Any sane person will quit something they don’t truly love.

5a Stop Dieting all the damn time.

Look, I get it, you are scared of food because “carbs make you bloated”, fats raise your cholesterol, sodium messes with your blood pressure and oh yeah, my favorite, you are addicted to sugar.

Do you see the common theme? What can you eat?

What if I told you that food can be viewed as an ally AND you can reach your goals. In fact, reaching your goals is much easier WITH food because you hold onto muscle in periods where you aren’t dieting. And you should have LONG periods where you don’t diet.

The simple fact is you control more than you think and what I would like you to do is to have a good meal, go sit next to a lake or a tree or something and ask yourself.

“Is this who I wanted to become” and if that answer is no come up with a plan for exercise that you love and come up with a way of eating that makes you feel whole and in charge.